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Monthly Archives: April 2012

UPDATE: I gave the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS another try and everything worked out of the box! Nice!!!

So I guess I’ll have to give Unity another chance… (so far, I find the HUD useful)

After almost 2 years since my laptop died on me, I decided to buy a replacement. I proposed the idea to my wife, June, and she approved (maybe because I’ve been using her laptop for the past 2 years 🙂 ).

I’m targeting a >= 12″ inch netbook since I’ve learned in the last 2 years that I don’t need that much processing power . My usage pattern can settle for an Atom or Brazos CPU since I’m using laptops mostly as a terminal, the grunt work are done in servers. Besides, I don’t want to haul a 2kg+ brick.

There’s a plethora of netbooks from different OEMs nowadays so there is a lot to choose from. I narrowed my list to these two: Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E125 or HP DM1. It was a tough choice to make. But after scouring a few stores (in Cyberzone MegaMall) and weighing my options, I settled with the E125.

I chose E125 because of these reasons:

Keyboard is better, IMHO

2 DIMM slots (I’m planning to upgrade it to 8GB in the future)

no OS pre-installed

I tried installing Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 beta but these 2 are not that stable for my needs when I tested it. My SBW Huawei dongle is experiencing intermittent connections for one and I’m not convinced to switch to Unity yet.

This is the rundown of how I found device drivers for the Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E125.

I encountered a problem with the sound configuration. Sounds are not playing in headphones if you plug one. It will just continue playing in the laptop speaker instead. I was able to fix it by upgrading ALSA to version 1.0.25, just use this guide on how to do it (just replace 1.0.23 with 1.0.25).

video:

I was able to install the latest ATI Catalyst drivers by following this guide. The installation was successful when I installed the driver manually.

card reader:

Download the driver from the Realtek website. Make sure that you switched to superuser (not sudo) when running make, it will fail if you don’t.